


A Lesson in Bloodletting

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - What We Do in the Shadows, Comedy, Family Dinners, GaaLee Bingo 2020, M/M, Meet the Family, vampires and werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27109453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Lee has been a vampire since the '80s, but Gaara is the first person he's dated since he was turned. Not that Gaara is, strictly speaking, a person. And now it's time to meet his boyfriend's family. Or rather, hispack.For GaaLee Bingo Card #2: Monster
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 28
Kudos: 160
Collections: GaaLee Bingo





	A Lesson in Bloodletting

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Luna_Lee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna_Lee) for granting me the use of this title, and thank you to [@mrnara](https://mrnara.tumblr.com) for the idea of turning this very vague concept into a meet-the-family story.
> 
>  **Warnings:** This is more of a humor story than anything, but it is still vampires and werewolves, so there's a fair amount of discussion of blood and guts, injuries, animal and human death, and child abuse (through supernatural means).

“You must be Lee.” 

The woman standing in the doorway has shaggy blonde hair tied back into a rough ponytail. She looks Lee up and down, her sharp, preternaturally blue eyes narrowed. 

“And you must be Temari!” Lee beams at her, trying his darndest to give off the vibe that he’s both an extremely competent adult and that he poses no threat to her brother. You know, typical meeting-the-boyfriend’s-family stuff. “I’m so pleased to meet you!” 

He sticks his hand out for a shake, careful to keep his fingertips on the far side of the threshold. After all, he has yet to be invited in. 

“Charmed, I’m sure.” It’s more a growl than actual words. Her nails are very sharp, and she drags them against his palm as if in warning. 

The scratches she leaves don’t bleed. Little cuts like that never do, not unless he’s recently fed (and had a very full meal at that). 

“Temari,” comes a low, scratchy voice from somewhere behind Temari’s looming shoulder. She’s gone up on her tiptoes and puffed her shoulders out, trying to make herself look bigger. “Stop trying to intimidate him. What, are you going to show him your eye teeth next?” 

“I might.” 

Lee’s grin only broadens. 

“Gaara!” 

Gaara’s lithe body hip-checks his sister out of the way. She gives him a warning growl, and he snarls right back. Temari is technically their den mother, but you’d never know it from how Gaara reacts to her threat displays. 

“Lee.” Gaara’s light eyes drag down Lee’s body. The scrutiny feels very different from the judgmental glower Temari just leveled him with, although the motion is identical. Gaara’s look is more tactile, more intimate. Sensual as a physical caress. “You made it.”

“Of course I did!” Lee’s cheeks are starting to ache from how hard he’s smiling. The pain is, as always, a degree removed from the pain of living. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world!” 

Gaara’s still in his stocking feet, the collar of his shirt most of the way unbuttoned and its wrinkled hem untucked. The sight of him partially undressed and slightly disheveled would have Lee’s face burning if he had blood to spare. It certainly brings to mind far less casual events than a family dinner. 

“I’m running a little behind,” Gaara excuses himself.

“He spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom getting his hair perfect,” Temari cackles. 

The bristling look Gaara shoots her, hackles raised, causes his carefully smoothed-down hair to spring up in unruly flyaways. 

“The artfully tousled look suits you,” Lee reassures him. 

Gaara’s eyes drop to his toes, which are twisting in the carpet. His cheeks have gone a fetching pink. 

“Thank you.” 

Honestly, Lee could stand here and compliment Gaara up and down all evening, but the heat is on inside the house, and it’s seeping out into the cold night air.

Lee clears his throat. 

“Um, may I come in?” he asks. And, sure, he _literally_ can’t come inside without an invitation—that’s part of the curse—but he would have asked anyway, because it’s only polite. Besides, it’s important to him to know that he’s wanted. To know that Gaara, specifically, wants him there.

“Of course.” Gaara steps aside, holding the door wide. “You know you’re always welcome here.” 

He raises up on his tiptoes to kiss Lee’s cheek as Lee passes, one warm hand finding Lee’s and squeezing.

“That could be dangerous,” Lee chuckles.

“I’m willing to take the risk.” He releases Lee’s hand after one final squeeze, and Lee relishes in the roughness of his palm. “Make yourself at home. I’m just going to finish getting dressed.”

He pads out of the room so silently that you would be forgiven for mistaking him for the undead one in their relationship. Lee is left behind to stand awkwardly in the doorway, riddled with anxiety. He bounces back and forth on his toes, making uncertain eye contact with Temari, who’s just standing in the doorway to the kitchen with her arms crossed, glaring at him. 

“Um, should I take off my shoes?” Lee nods to his tightly laced high-tops, each tied off with a tidy double-knotted bow. 

“I don’t care,” she replies drily, but Lee notes that she’s standing on the linoleum in leatherette ankle boots, so he keeps them on. 

“So, Gaara says you don’t eat.” A face pops over Temari’s shoulder, round-cheeked and dark-haired. The only bit of resemblance to Gaara is around the eyes, which are dark-circled and sleep deprived just like Gaara’s are, and that same piercing, otherworldly blue. 

“Hullo, Kankuro!” Lee gives him a jolly wave. They’ve spoken before, if only briefly, when Lee has dropped Gaara off after a date. “And no, I don’t so much eat as … feed?” 

“Hope you don’t mind that I didn’t ask after your dietary restrictions, then.” Kankuro nods backwards into the kitchen, from which wafts a coppery scent that is just animal enough to be unappetizing. “I just made something we like.” 

“As long as there’s no garlic, there won’t be any problem!” 

Temari rolls her eyes. When she crosses her arms over her chest like that, she looks very much like her youngest brother. “No alliums in this household. We’d get sick.”

“Right, I knew that!” Lee is still learning the things that werewolves can and can’t eat. Gaara has pointed him to a few veterinary websites, but there’s just such an extensive list of dangerous foods, and Lee has never had much of a mind for studies. “I hope it’s okay that I brought my own dinner? I didn’t want to make things uncomfortable by just sitting here while the rest of you ate.” 

He hoists the bag he’s been carrying on his elbow in illustration. Kankuro grimaces.

“That better not be a severed head or anything.”

“Of course it isn’t!” Lee’s eyes widen. “It’s just a thermos!” 

“Of blood.”

“Well—” 

It _is_ that. Vampires can’t consume anything other than human blood without becoming terribly, debilitatingly ill, and Lee doesn’t exactly relish the thought of having to rush from Gaara’s pack’s dinner table to projectile vomit in their bathroom. 

But it’s certainly not as if he … _beheaded_ anyone to get the blood being kept body-warm in his insulated thermos. He doesn’t even maim people, which is more than can be said for most of the vampires he knows.

“Lee doesn’t drink directly from humans.” A warm hand slips onto the small of Lee’s back, a gravelly voice in his ear. Gaara has snuck up on him while he’s been sputtering. His shirt is neatly buttoned to his collarbone now, tucked in to the dark jeans belted around his waist. He smooths down his shirtfront and gives Lee a little look from beneath the fringe of his once more neatly combed bangs. 

If Lee had a beating heart, it would be racing right now. Gaara looks good enough to eat. 

And isn’t that a risky thought.

“You look very nice,” he whispers to the crown of Gaara’s head, where his natural curls are already straining against the product he used to flatten them. 

“So do you.” Gaara’s head bumps his shoulder, almost a nuzzle.

“So, what, your blood is, like … ethically sourced? Free range?” Kankuro’s thick eyebrows are furrowed into a wrinkled line across the middle of his face, clenched so close they’re nearly touching. 

“It’s donated!” Lee chirps.

He actually has a very cordial working relationship with the local blood bank. He’s been their star volunteer for the past sixty-two blood drives, in fact! His chocolate chip cookies are downright famous at the recovery table. And if the phlebotomists there think that his long-sleeved turtlenecks and the bandages wrapped down to his fingers are owing to a rare medical condition, well … Neji has always said _some_ level of deception is necessary to survive as a vampire. 

“I was a vegetarian before I was turned,” Lee explains, “so willingly given blood is the next best thing.”

He only takes the bad blood, anyway. The dangerous stuff that’s going to be disposed of, that’s infected or otherwise unusable, so he’s not taking it from someone else who needs it more than him. It’s not as if it can make him sick the way it would a human. And he always makes sure to personally call whoever donated the bag, even if it would be in his own best interest to have them keep coming back, unawares. He doesn’t want anyone out there unknowingly transmitting diseases when there are treatments available. 

“I also brought dessert!” Lee digs in his bag to hold out the bulky tray that must have drawn Kankuro’s eye. “For you three, of course.” He hands the tray off to Temari, who lifts it to her nose, sniffing it critically. “I know wine is the traditional dinner party gift, but I thought that since Gaara doesn’t drink, perhaps …” 

“Perhaps?” Temari arches an eyebrow until it disappears behind the rough chop of her bangs. 

Lee swallows and tugs at his collar. He doesn’t want to cause offense. There are some aspects of werewolves that are quite like domestic dogs, and some that are decidedly not. Gaara is not sensitive about Lee’s cultural missteps, but he has mentioned offhand that confusing the two can lead to significant upset. 

“Perhaps that was … a family decision?” The last few words escape Lee as an anxious squeak.

Temari throws her head back, barking a laugh. “Glad you decided not to try and poison us.” 

Lee sags with relief. Just a joke then. Maybe a bit of light hazing. He can handle this. 

He truly does want to make a good impression on Gaara’s pack. Standing in front of him are the two most important people in the world to Gaara, and surviving tonight in his siblings’ good graces is an important high-water mark in their relationship getting more serious. And Lee really, desperately wants things to keep getting more serious. He likes Gaara _so much_. He hasn’t felt this way about someone since … since … Well, since he can last remember _feeling_. 

Gaara makes his face heat like he still has blood pumping through his veins. He makes his palms clammy and his mouth dry in a way that has nothing to do with needing to feed. Gaara makes his heart—or rather, the withered husk of an organ where Lee’s heart used to be—feel like it might start to beat again. 

“Are these _dog biscuits?_ ” Kankuro has lifted the corner of the saran wrap, the bridge of his nose wrinkled as he scents the air. 

Lee quails. 

“What? No!” he protests. “They’re cookies!” 

He’s suddenly very glad he decided to go with a traditional circle shapes instead of the adorable bone-shaped cookie cutters he found in the clearance section. Gaara would have found them humorous. His siblings, Lee suspects, not so much. 

“Peanut butter cookies,” Gaara confirms, nose raised to huff the air. “With organic, sugar-free peanut butter.”

“I was concerned about xylitol,” Lee explains. “I heard certain artificial sweeteners can be dangerous for, um—”

“Solid.” Kankuro plucks a cookie from the tray and pops it in his mouth. “Oh, these are _hella_ ,” he groans around a mouthful of crumbs. 

Temari slaps his hand. “Don’t ruin your appetite.” 

Kankuro raises his upper lip to bare his teeth. “So you’re wanting the smallest piece of meat, then.”

“Try it and see.” Temari is shorter than her brother, but with the way she’s positioned her body, up on the toes of her heeled boots, she seems to tower over him. 

“Is dinner ready?” Gaara interrupts their bickering. 

Temari and Kankuro go suddenly, remarkably placid, puffed chests deflating and hair that was just standing on-end falling flat. Lee suspects, as he has before, that Gaara’s pack dynamics are slightly more complicated than simply Temari being the eldest and therefore the one in charge. 

Kankuro casts a glance over his shoulder. “Yeah, should be.”

“Then let’s eat.” Temari grins sharply. “I’m starving.”

* * *

Once they’re seated at the table, the sibling trio tucking into their food and Lee sipping quietly from his thermos, Kankuro turns his attention back to Lee.

“So, like, how’d you get to be a vampire?” he asks, mouth still full with a slice of extremely rare venison.

Gaara downed a deer on the last full moon, he’d told Lee, and their pack both refuses to let good meat go to waste and appreciates the frugality of avoiding the grocery store’s butcher counter. Venison freezes well, apparently, and the pack’s freezer is stuffed full with the remnants of Gaara’s kills. 

There’s a ring of myoglobin on Kankuro’s lips. The air around the tiny kitchen table reeks of dead animal. 

“Sorry if that’s rude,” Kankuro adds, in the face of Lee’s uncertain silence. “I don’t really know a lot about vampires. If it’s like a, uh, ‘how’d you lose your leg’ kinda thing—” He nods towards Lee’s left leg and the prosthesis concealed by his acid wash jeans. “—you don’t have to answer.” 

“Well, I lost the leg in a motorcycle accident,” Lee explains, not the least bit offended. “I was driving too fast in the rain like a reckless teenager and I slid under an eighteen wheeler.” 

Temari raises her upper lip in a sneer. Lee can feel the judgment radiating off her over the varnished wood of the circular little table. He glances to Gaara for reassurance, but Gaara is very systematically dissecting his piece of meat with his steak knife, separating the eye round into identical, square pieces. 

Kankuro sucks air between his teeth. “I thought vampires had, like, healing powers,” he says, staring down at Lee’s leg like he can see right through the denim to the plastic and metal beneath. “How come it didn’t grow back?” 

Kankuro must know as little about vampires as Lee knows about werewolves. Any changes to the body that occur prior to the night of the turn—including injuries or disabilities—remain in state, the body’s external appearance preserved just as it was. There are amputee vampires just as there are deaf vampires and vampires who use wheelchairs. 

“Uh, it doesn’t quite work like that …” Lee searches for the simplest explanation. 

Across the table, Temari’s eyes bore into him. 

Lee is grateful that Gaara scheduled this dinner for the night of the new moon, when his pack’s animalistic instincts would be at an ebb and tensions would be lowest. Kankuro is jocular enough, despite the prying, but Lee can’t imagine facing down Temari close to a full moon. 

“Don’t be an idiot, Kankuro,” Gaara says to his thoroughly bloody plate. “If a vampire bite undid everything that happened before it, you’d revert into a baby when you turned.” 

“So, like, you’re exactly the same as before you got bitten?” Kankuro’s eyes remain on Lee, not the least bit cowed by Gaara’s jibe.

“Mhm!” Lee pushes up the sleeve of his jacket to show the road rash puckering his skin, turning his wrist to exhibit the surgical scar that spans up to the inside of his elbow. “I even still have the rod in my spine. Lucky for me there’s no silver alloy in it!” 

“And your turn?” Temari speaks up for the first time since they’ve sat down. She’s the only one at the table who has so much as touched the pile of leafy greens on her plate. “What made you decide you wanted to be a vampire? Or … were you even given that choice?” 

“I was in a fight,” Lee says carefully. 

There’s too much to this story to explain properly and concisely, not without boring or frightening his company. How does he even begin to explain the boiling intensity of his pitched battle with the eighteenth century dandy who frequented his favorite arcade, so haughty that his talking-down sent Lee spoiling for a fight? How to put into words the way that passion that bubbled over into a sprawling bout of fisticuffs in a back alley, without coming across as a hooligan or a buffoon? And while werewolves are obviously no strangers to blood, Lee doesn’t relish the idea of detailing how he nearly bled out, sprawled there atop a pile of overflowing trash bags, carotid artery gushing from the slash of Neji’s fangs. That was, until the cut over Neji’s eye—placed there by the haymaker Lee landed on him at the beginning of their brawl, with his fist laden with cheap, imitation-gold rings—dripped blood into Lee’s open, death-rattling mouth. Neji expected him to bleed to death, he’d told Lee later, after the pale, shaking nausea and the involuntary levitation and the sickening crack of his teeth as they lengthened and the frantic 911 call that Neji deadened by snapping Lee’s telephone in half. 

“It … was an accident,” Lee continues, still wary, eyes darting from one of Gaara’s siblings to the other, assessing their reaction. 

Temari remains steadfastly stone-faced, but Kankuro looks intrigued.

“A happy accident, though! I certainly don’t regret it!” Lee hastens to add. “Even if I miss some things about being human, there are so many benefits to being undead.”

“Like what?” Kankuro asks. 

“The speed and strength, for one. I’ve maxed out the weights on the bicep curl machine at the gym!” 

“And when was this?” Temari is studying the blade of her steak knife, angled so it flashes in the overhead light. 

She can’t hurt Lee with it—not permanently, anyway, not unless it’s silver, which he doubts—but instinct still makes him nervous. 

“The weights? Maybe eight months ago? I’ve been working hard towards that goal for the past twenty years!” 

Having to change gyms every few years is a bit inconvenient, since he can’t let the patrons or employees get suspicious of how he never ages, but variety is the spice of the afterlife. 

“The turn,” she corrects him. 

“Oh! Nineteen eighty-four!” He grins. “A most auspicious year, if I do say so myself.” 

“Huh.” Kankuro smirks, gesturing broadly at Lee. “That explains your whole … get up.” 

“My ... ?” Lee looks down at himself. 

He’s not dressed to the nines—Gaara said a suit was too formal for a family dinner—but he’s still rather nicely kitted out in a handsome leaf-patterned polo and his single pair of name-brand jeans. He scrubbed the dickens out of his high-tops before he came over, toothbrush on the plastic and all. He’s wearing his expensive fluro jacket, for goodness’ sake! Even Tenten said he was dressed ‘snappy’ before he ran out the door. … Not that she’s exactly a modern fashionista or anything. She still hasn’t gotten over the invention of indoor toilets. 

“Ignore him.” There’s a warm hand on his arm, sudden and bracing. Gaara’s voice drops low, just for Lee’s ears. “I already told you that you looked handsome, didn’t I?” 

It’s impossible for Lee not to drift towards that warmth, impossible not to let a goofy smile creep across his face by degrees. 

“An accidental turn, huh?” Temari’s voice is as precise as a scalpel and just as sharp. “So you never wanted to be a vampire?” 

“Well, I—” Lee balks. “No, but—”

“Hey, nothing to be embarrassed about!” Kankuro booms, clapping him so firmly on the back that his frame shudders. “Not everyone’s change goes perfect. Y’know, Gaara’s first bite didn’t take.”

The hand on Lee’s forearm tightens. 

“Yes, I know.” 

Lee knows—of course he knows—the origin of the horrible scar on Gaara’s forehead, two interlocking bitemarks in the shape of a heart, where his mother tried to sink her dying jaws and managed to miss every major vein on his tiny, premature body. He may not know much about werewolves’ diets, but he does know this: some werewolves are born, the union of two werewolf parents and a mother’s bite … and some werewolves are made. 

Gaara, unfortunately, is both. When his first bite from his weakened mother didn’t take, his body was too frail, poisoned by her saliva and bewildered by the supernatural blood flowing through his veins without the finishing bite, for him to tolerate a second bite. He’d spent his childhood in agony every full moon, writhing on the floor of his bedroom, terrifyingly human, while the rest of his pack transformed and fled into the woods, leaving him behind and alone. 

And his second bite, when he was thirteen and finally strong enough to withstand it, was just one more exercise in excruciation. He’d described to Lee, with utter neutrality, the depth to which his father’s teeth sunk into his shoulder, far more penetrating than necessary, intent on wounding him, to the point that his shoulder aches even to this day. He’d told Lee, too, of his first full moon, how his bones cracked and shuddered, how his body rearranged itself, dreadful in its slowness, with him still too young to fully understand what was happening to him or why. 

It’s against werewolf ethics, apparently, to turn a human child. They don’t always survive the moon, their growing bodies still fragile and prone to breaking in all the wrong ways. 

Gaara’s father didn’t care about that. 

Lee turns his hand over, catches Gaara’s fingers between his and squeezes. 

Temari’s staring at Kankuro with eyes like daggers, canines bared. 

Kankuro tugs at his collar and clears his throat. 

“So, uh, Gaara’s met your pack, right?” he says with supreme awkwardness. 

“My coven, actually.” Lee seizes the change in conversation like a drowning man grabbing a life raft. “That’s what we call it. Every vampire who can trace their origin back to the same sire.” 

“Sire?” 

“Um, the person who bit you. That’s your sire.” 

“So the guy who bit you does this a lot?” Temari leans forward over her now-empty plate, mopped clean of the oily sheen of the rare meat with a bit of bread. “How many people are in your coven, anyway?”

“Just four, actually! And Neji only sired me. But _his_ sire is Might Guy, so we’re both part of his coven. Us and Tenten.” 

“So you haven’t … _sired_ anyone?” Temari’s gaze weighs on him like rocks stacked upon his chest. 

“No!” Lee grips his thermos so hard that the metal gives a squeaky complaint. “I would never—not unless I was _sure_ that—” 

“He _said_ he doesn’t go after humans.” Gaara’s voice is a guttural growl, all threat.

“Eat your roughage,” Temari snaps at him, rather than addressing the objection. She jabs with one sharp-nailed finger at Gaara’s untouched pile of greens. “If you just fill up on meat you’ll get constipated.”

Gaara snarls and shoots her a look that could turn weaker beings to stone, but he drops Lee’s hand and returns his fork to his plate, shoveling a bite of limp leaves into his mouth. 

Kankuro appears to have tried to hide some of his spinach under his dinner roll, giving the impression that he’s eaten it without actually having touched the stuff. 

“So, I’ve always wanted to know this,” he blurts, before Temari can turn her scrutiny upon his plate, “can vampires get boners?” 

“Yes,” Gaara says flatly over Lee’s sputtering, not looking up from his plate of greens, a little trail of grease dripping from the corner of his lip down to his chin. “But they have to drink first.” 

“Eurgh, is that why you’ve got that thing?” Kankuro gestures to Lee’s thermos. “Planning on getting your mack on later?” 

“No!” Lee yelps. “I just didn’t want to be rude!” 

Kankuro guffaws, slapping Lee on the shoulder once more. “Just messin’ with ya, sport.” 

“Stop heckling him,” Gaara intones, his face not betraying the slightest hint of emotion as he looks up from his plate of half-eaten greens to his brother, “or the next time he gets an erection, I’ll make sure it’s in your bed.” 

Lee gasps. “I wouldn’t—!”

Temari raps her nails against the table, the clatter so loud it draws all the attention in the room.

“Let’s get down to silver bullets,” she says, and all four of them shudder. “What is your angle, here, exactly? You’ve been, what, twenty-five—?”

“Twenty-three,” Lee corrects her.

“—for forty years.”

“Thirty-six, actually.”

“Is this a fucking vampire thing?” she snaps at him, hair going wild. “The number obsession?”

“Um.” Lee ducks his head. 

“Nevermind! I don’t want to hear it. The point is, Gaara’s going to get older. He’ll age. Eventually, he’ll _die_. You just said you don’t turn people, so what is it you want from him? What are you getting out of this?” 

Lee expected this inquiry, but still the answer evades him. The question has been the linchpin of their relationship, the whole reason Lee hasn’t dated in nearly four decades, why he was so hesitant to accept Gaara’s first kiss that rainy night at the bus stop. 

He really hasn’t spent much time with _humans_ in years, outside of cordial interactions at blood drives or as necessary to survive—short transactions at stores, paying for his coven’s newest set of fake IDs, that sort of thing. 

Not that Gaara is human. At least, not fully. 

But he is still alive. Still _mortal_. 

And he’s also … so special. Guy is always talking about finding one’s ‘most precious person’, in that booming voice of his that carries centuries’ worth of wisdom. Lee thinks Gaara might be his. There isn’t much that makes Lee feel these days, but Gaara—Gaara with his warm, rough hands; Gaara with his dry jokes and wry little smiles; Gaara with his expressions so subtle that you have to study his face to make sure you’ve understood him right—makes Lee nearly rupture with emotion. 

And Gaara _wants_ him. Not just physically, although Lee has to admit that, too, is very nice. But emotionally, too. Intellectually. He’s the only person who’s ever sat still through Lee’s meandering rants and impassioned speeches without getting bored or complaining, eyes trained on Lee like he’s studying some incredibly fascinating specimen, completely rapt with attention. He grabs for Lee’s hand in the face of discomfort, cold and clammy though it is. His sleep habits are terrible—worse near the full moon—but he’s told Lee that the long sleepless hours pass as if in the blink of an eye when they’re together. 

“I—” Lee glances down at the tabletop, where Gaara has laced their fingers once more. “I’m just here for as long as Gaara wants me to be. I know that he’ll grow and move on eventually, and I’m okay with that. But in the meantime, I just want him to feel safe and …” Lee swallows around the word that it’s too soon to say. “... cherished.” 

Gaara’s nails dig into the back of Lee’s hand, the squeeze so tight it would be painful if Lee’s nociceptors weren’t mostly dead. He’s glaring at Lee out of the corner of his eye, his thin lips pursed around the opening bars of a familiar debate. 

“Would you turn him?” Kankuro asks, breaking the tense silence that’s settled over the table like a shroud. “If things got serious?” 

Lee feels that their relationship is already quite serious. Deadly serious. Serious as a stake through the heart. But he doesn’t object to Kankuro’s statement. 

It’s a fascinating little quirk of biology. A vampire’s bite can turn a werewolf, but a werewolf’s bite can’t turn a vampire. A fact Lee has certainly benefited from, because Gaara is rather mouthy in the bedroom. 

“Only if he asked. And if he was asking for the right reasons.” Lee offers a weak grin in the face of the question he can see nearly bursting from Kankuro’s lips: _What are the right reasons?_ (They can’t have anything to do with Lee, for one. Turning for love may sound romantic, but even Lee, who hasn’t been a vampire that long, has seen enough vampire romances go south to know better. An eternity is a long, long time.) “The choice to become undead isn’t an easy one. There’s a lot you give up in exchange for eternal life. Dinners like this one, to start. Not to mention sunshine!” 

“I’m hardly awake during the day anyway,” Gaara grumbles, his sharp nails no longer pinching Lee’s skin quite so hard, but still lingering there like a threat. 

“Don’t tell me you’re seriously considering this?” Temari’s voice has gone shrill. “You’ve only been dating a few months.” 

It’s been closer to half a year—one hundred and eighty-one days, to be precise—but Lee has no idea what lies Gaara might have slipped to his siblings, like poison secreted into a goblet. So he stays mum. 

“No,” Gaara says, his lower lip popping out from the bite of his sharp teeth into a pout. Lee can’t quite pin the emotion he feels in response to this. It’s like a sickening mixture of disappointment and relief. “I’m just saying.” 

“Just _saying_ that you’d _die_ for some—some— _bloodsucker!_ ” Temari’s hair frizzes until it’s all on end, her fingers leaving gouges in the tabletop. The lean muscles in her forearms bulge as she half-stands, body leaned over the table. “Do you even know what happens to a werewolf when they turn?”

“Yes,” Gaara says, staring her down. His claws start to lengthen, darkening against Lee’s skin, although he doesn’t let go of Lee’s hand. 

Lee decidedly does _not_ know. He is simply aware it’s a possibility, and even then only because Gaara told him. 

“Then you know why there hasn’t been a pack member turned since—! Since—!”

“Yes.” Gaara’s voice is taut under the defiant haughtiness. He leans back, dropping Lee’s hand to cross his arms over his chest. 

Lee’s mind is racing. What is it Gaara hasn’t told him? Is it dangerous? Potentially lethal? He would _never_ do anything that might hurt Gaara … Gaara has to know that!

His head whips around to look at Gaara, whose teeth have sharpened, hanging over the bridge of his lower lip, leaving valleys in the skin there. Lee fumbles to put his question to words.

A chair screeches across the linoleum as Kankuro pushes his seat back and stands.

“Wow, great dinner!” he announces, patting his stomach as if he weren’t the one who cooked it. 

The tension shatters like coffin wood splintering six feet under. All eyes are trained on Kankuro. 

“I’m ready for dessert, how about you?” he says brightly. 

“I can help with the dishes!” Lee leaps to his feet to exclaim, already gathering dirty plates and glasses into his arms. 

“The kitchen is pack-only,” Temari snaps, coming around the table to snatch the cutlery from his hands. 

“Oh! I’m so sorry!” 

“Don’t be.” Gaara’s hand wraps around Lee’s upper arm like a vise, and Lee thinks he must be exerting some of his curse-given strength to drag Lee back to the living room as his siblings vanish into the kitchen. “She’s being territorial.” 

He sits Lee down firmly on the plush couch in the living room—Lee sinks into it like a millstone—and climbs up beside him, legs curled under himself as he nestles into Lee’s side. It’s not comfortable for Lee, with his prosthesis, to sit with his legs beneath himself like that, so he stays sitting up straight, feet at square angles on the floor. 

“I swear,” Gaara mutters, half to himself, “it’s like she wants me to piss on you or something.”

Lee’s strangled giggle comes out a little hysterical. “I know some people are, um … but I don’t think I would be into that!” 

Gaara’s derisive snort huffs right down Lee’s collar as he nuzzles against Lee’s neck. “Relax. It was a joke.”

“Oh.” Lee does relax, but only minutely. “Gaara, what your sister was saying about—”

“I’m going to put on some TV,” Gaara interrupts, holding out the remote. “What do you want to watch?”

“Um, anything is fine.” Lee swallows heavily as one of Gaara’s small, warm hands finds its way up under the hem of his shirt and onto the small of his back. He’s not going to let Gaara get away with changing the subject like this, but—

Gaara’s nails scrape across the divots at the base of Lee’s spine, a slow drag of friction with the slightest tickle of pain. 

“Whatever you want,” Lee says.

“Mm, are you sure?” Gaara smells of the artificial musk of hair wax and the iron tang of animal blood, body warm all along Lee’s cold side. “They’re playing _Twilight_ on channel 14. What if I wanted to watch that?” 

Lee can’t help but laugh. “Anything but that!” 

“I think you’d look good in glitter.” Gaara’s dry voice doesn’t betray a hint of the teasing he’s obviously prodding at. 

“There’s a twenty-four hour Hallowen store downtown. I’m sure they sell craft glitter there if you want to make your fantasy a reality.” 

Gaara chuckles into Lee’s neck before settling on the nature channel, where a documentary on carnivorous plants is playing. Lee half-watches as a fly circles the pink lips of a pitcher plant, lured in by the nectar-sweet smell that masks the rot of insect corpses within. 

From the kitchen, there’s the ring and clatter of a pot being slammed into a sink. 

“I think he seems all right!” comes a raised, muffled voice. “I mean, smells kinda funky, but who doesn’t?”

Gaara has mentioned that Lee doesn’t smell like other vampires. All vampires smell like the dead, to werewolves, but Lee smells like stale blood instead of fresh. Owing, Lee assumes, to his diet. 

“He’s a _vampire!_ ” Temari’s growl is so loud that the closed door doesn’t block the noise at all. “He’s _dangerous!_ ”

“Ignore her.” Gaara presses a kiss to Lee’s neck, right over the bite marks on his throat. “She’ll warm up.”

“After what happened to mom—” Temari’s voice cracks on a sob. More plates clatter. The juddering of pipes and the rush of water into the sink’s basin drowns out the rest of the sentence. 

“Gaara,” Lee says very carefully. “What happened to your mother?” 

Gaara’s small body goes whisper-still against him, braced like prey in the midst of a hunt. 

“I don’t want to talk about it.” 

Lee is no great genius, but he can still count to ten and tell when a digit’s been skipped. 

“Did your father try to find someone to—”

“I _said_ I don’t want to talk about it.” Gaara’s claws lengthen right above the rod bolted to Lee’s spine, but he keeps talking, his voice a raspy murmur. “She was already weak from the difficult childbirth and halfway dead. It was a fool’s errand to begin with. And the _snake_ my father found was a duplicitous little bastard—”

The teeth against Lee’s neck are razor sharp. 

Gaara takes a short breath, and they retreat, flattening. 

“It won’t happen to me,” is all he says, shutting the conversation down like a dusty tome slammed closed. 

Lee lets the subject drop, but he can fill in the blanks. It certainly answers some questions. Why Orochimaru’s goons were following Gaara the night they met, for one. 

On the television, the narrator’s voice drones. 

_The nectar field lures an insect ever-downward, the fine hairs above making retreat almost impossible._

* * *

Gaara’s hand has slipped all the way around Lee’s waist, Lee’s arm tight around his shoulder, when his siblings return to the living room. 

Kankuro is holding the plate of cookies, their bounty suspiciously sparser than before. Temari’s eyes are red at the corners. 

“Temari,” Gaara says, his voice all warning.

“I’m playing nice!” she shrills, stomping heavily across the room. She throws herself down in an armchair in the corner, readjusting twice before she pulls her knees up to her chin and wraps her arms around them.

“We were thinking of playing a video game,” Kankuro announces. “How d’you feel about gettin’ your ass kicked in Mario Kart?”

“As long as there’s no touchpad or motion sensor, I’d be happy to play!” Lee straightens up, pulling his arm from around Gaara for propriety’s sake. Gaara remains attached to his side like lichen on rotting wood. 

“Touchpad?” Kankuro sets the plate down heavily on the coffee table, wedging himself in beside his brother with an exaggerated wiggling of his hips, until Gaara is jostled half into Lee’s lap. 

“Most forms of technology can’t detect me!” Lee fumbles in his jacket’s mesh pocket and holds out his phone in illustration. He still uses the one with the sliding manual keyboard, because smartphone touch screens don’t react at all to his fingers. They rely on some sort of small electricity field that dead bodies simply don’t carry, although Lee can use a stylus in a pinch. Sometimes, very soon after a large feed, he can manage to swipe a phone screen, but other than that, most phones react to him like they react to a blanket or a twig: with nothing. 

“Like in the photos,” Gaara adds, not lifting his head from Lee’s shoulder even at Lee’s increasing concern under his sister’s wrathful gaze. She’s still glaring at them from the corner like an especially animate gargoyle. “You remember.”

“You mean your selfie gallery,” Kankuro chortles, setting up the console. 

Gaara has tried a great many times to capture photographs of the two of them. His phone’s camera roll is full of pictures that at first glance appear to be selfies, but upon further inspection reveal the traces of Lee: a teddy bear floating mid-air from their date to the pier, an arm-shaped dent in the plush fur of Gaara’s jacket from the time they went ice-skating, a man-sized distortion in the smoke from the fog machine of the decidedly _un_ -haunted house they went to last weekend. 

Gaara growls at his brother, but he takes the controller from his hands when it’s offered. Lee takes one too, as does Temari, though she keeps her knees drawn up and herself closed-off, far from the rowdy gaggle of boys on the couch.

* * *

Not even thirty minutes later, Kankuro throws the controller across the room with a wounded howl.

“How?!” he yells at Lee. “You must be cheating!”

“I simply have excellent reflexes.” Lee grins at Yoshi’s little cart doing first-place donuts on the TV screen. “Also, I have had several extra decades to practice.”

Kankuro slides off the couch cushion onto the floor with a whine of defeat.

“So, how’d you and Gaara meet, anyway?” he says, staring up at Lee upside-down, “He’s been real cagey about it.”

“It’s embarrassing.” Gaara turns his head to look away.

Lee knows this can’t possibly be the case. Gaara isn’t embarrassed by _anything_ , not even the many times Lee’s coven mates have walked in on them in _flagrante delicto_. (Lee had hoped Gaara would be able to do the blushing for the both of them, when he’d shrieked and turned into a bat out of sheer mortification, but he’d been sorely disappointed.) 

“You have nothing to be embarrassed of!” Lee reassures him nonetheless. “You were very brave!”

“Brave?” Temari sits suddenly upright from her curled ball in the armchair. 

“I overreacted,” Gaara hisses. 

All at once, Lee understands Gaara’s reticence. He must not have wanted his pack to worry over him. 

“Gaara.” Temari’s mouth is a thin, severe line. “What happened?” 

Gaara just stares at her petulantly from under the ridge of his brow, so Lee quickly picks up the slack. 

“There were some older vampires …” Lee begins. Some vampires—the older ones, especially—act like there’s an expiration date on their humanity. Like they’ve forgotten they were ever human at all. It’s those sorts that Orochimaru preys on, that he snares into his foul clutches. “They were following him down an alley.”

They were idiots, was what Lee thought at first. He’d seen them baring their fangs and extending their hands and thought they didn’t know who—or _what_ —it was they were stalking. Lee could sense the wolf in Gaara’s movements clear as day, shadowed though he was by the towering buildings and the heavy clouds in the night sky. Now, Lee thinks, Orochimaru’s minions must have known _exactly_ what they were doing. And would have succeeded at it, too, with the way they had Gaara cornered, his claws out and his teeth exposed. They were two weeks out from the full moon, when werewolves’ powers were at their weakest, and even then Gaara swiped at them with blind desperation to defend himself, nose dripping rich, red blood from the vampires’ first lunge all over the pavement so it shone in the streetlamps’ pale glow.

His blood smelled like moonlight, Lee remembers, strong and clear even over the rubbish and vomit and concrete of that alley. It smelled like the air just before a storm rolled in and like green, living things bursting from sandy soil. Blood had never smelled especially appealing to Lee before that day—even freshly drained human blood only stank of necessity—but blood had also never smelled anything like _that_. 

Gaara smells like _werewolf_ , Lee knows now, a smell that’s supposed to put vampires on defensive guard against their (super)natural enemies.

But in that moment, all Lee’s body raced with was _desire_ , defensiveness and an absolute dizzying need to protect, an instinct blood had never stirred in him before that very moment. He’d kicked one of the other vampires nearly in two before he’d even decided to move. 

“Vampires?” Temari’s claws rend gaping holes in the upholstery as her fists tighten on the chair arms, stuffing bursting around her fingers. “Were they—?”

“Yes,” Gaara snaps. 

“And you were _alone?_ ”

“Dude!” Kankuro seems to finally catch the thread and bolts upright, spinning to face his brother. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking.” Gaara casts his eyes down. “I was angry.”

“And you—?” Temari cuts her eyes sharply to Lee.

“It was an unfair fight,” Lee says. “Four on one. I wasn’t about to let them take someone down in such an unsporting fashion.” 

It’s poor table manners to play with your food, Lee doesn’t add. And if he got a little bit of smug satisfaction from dispatching a bunch of miscreants who gave vampires a bad name, his heart singing like he was back in that bar fight and his brain still had adrenaline to release, that was his own little secret to hold. The manhole he’d battered them down was slick and deep, and the grate he kicked over the opening had holes too small for even a bat to fit through. He hoped the sun found them before Orochimaru did. It would have been kinder. Better to burn to death than—

“I thought it was five on one,” Gaara adds, nodding at Lee. “I mistook him for another assailant at first.” 

“Fortunately that case of mistaken identity didn’t last long!” Lee beams.

“Long enough.” Gaara’s fingers on Lee’s waist traipse over the very end of the scars on his stomach.

Vampires can heal themselves—this much is true—but wounds from other supernatural creatures heal _ugly_. And the marks Gaara gave him were _deep_ , three claw slashes right across his middle, so thorough they would have disemboweled him if he had living guts to spill. 

“Once we sorted things out, though, he offered to buy me a coffee!”

Lee doesn’t add how Gaara’s eyes went wide, white all the way around those piercing blue irises, when black blood bubbled to Lee’s lips as he asked, “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” He doesn’t mention the way Gaara fell to his knees right there between the dumpsters, heaving at the reek of Lee’s stale flesh on his claws, panicked eyes darting from the screeches coming from the manhole as Orochimaru’s crew turned on one another and began to tear themselves apart to the groans of pain crawling from Lee’s mouth as the skin of his stomach knitted back together. Lee also doesn’t mention that it was he who comforted Gaara, afterwards, when all Gaara could do was stare at his claws clenched on the pavement and mutter, “Sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, not again, I’m sorry,” or that it was he who suggested they go to a coffee shop for Gaara to warm up, and that it was only belatedly that Gaara offered to pay. 

“That apology was a waste of my money,” Gaara says gravely. “You didn’t drink a sip.” 

“I was trying to be polite!” Lee throws his hands up in mock defense. Puking on someone tends to leave an even worse impression than refusing to drink the coffee they graciously purchased you. 

“You saved him.” Temari’s long legs unfold, and her voice is suddenly so soft and quiet it might as well be the whisper of breeze across dewy grass on a moonless night. 

“I wouldn’t say that I—”

“You _did_.” Her mouth is parted in awe as she crosses the room and takes one of Lee’s ice-cold hands between her palms. Her skin is remarkably soft in the absence of threatening claws. “Orochimaru would have killed him. He’s been after our pack since our father—” 

“I told you he wasn’t bad,” Gaara speaks up from Lee’s side, eyeing her. “I _told_ you.”

“But, Gaara, I didn’t know—”

“So it’s settled then!” Kankuro sits forward with a sudden clap of his hands, a goofy grin on his face that looks more doglike than wolflike. “We all like Gaara’s new boyfriend.”

Temari drops Lee’s hand and turns her head away with a harsh exhale through her nose. “Yes, _fine_ , we all like Lee.” She glances over her shoulder at Gaara, eyes narrowed. “Don’t think this gets you out of talking about this. You’re just lucky he was there.” 

“I know.” Gaara rolls his eyes and snorts as his sister stoops to take one of Lee’s cookies from the tray on the coffee table, popping it in her mouth.

“These are excellent,” she says, muffled like her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth—there’s a _lot_ of peanut butter in them. “You’ll have to give me the recipe.”

“Of course!” Lee beams, shooting her a thumbs-up. 

“Told you so,” Gaara cranes up to whisper in Lee’s ear, all warm, snuffly breath. Lee relaxes into the heat of him, Gaara’s fingers tracing little patterns over the scars on his stomach. 

“Pack howl?” Kankuro suggests. 

“Pack howl,” Temari agrees begrudgingly, face still turned to the far wall, arms back across her chest as her jaw works through her third cookie. 

As one, the three siblings throw their heads back and _howl_ , long and loud and harmonious. 

Kankuro pauses for breath to look at Lee. “You too,” he says. “You’re deep in the shit, now. Howl with us.”

Lee tips his head back and gives it all he’s got. 

“Awoooo!”

When he finishes, he looks back up to find all three siblings staring at him with their mouths agog, in varying degrees of horror. 

… He wasn’t that discordant, was he?

“You’re gonna have to teach him how to howl properly,” Kankuro drawls, sitting up on his knees to elbow Gaara in the ribs. “That shit was _pathetic_.” 

“Oh, I think I can make him howl.” Gaara glances sidelong at Lee and licks one sharp tooth. 

Lee’s eyes widen. He gulps. 

“Gross!” Kankuro whips a couch pillow at his brother. 

Gaara’s reflexes are fast, but Lee’s are faster, thirty-six years of training behind his inhuman response time as he bats the pillow aside before it touches one frizzy hair on Gaara’s heavily gelled head. 

The ensuing pillow fight sends the tray of cookies flying and nearly breaks a lamp. Even Temari gets in on it, and when they’re all lying breathless on the living room floor, covered in feathery down and cotton batting, she rolls over and claps Lee hard on the shoulder.

Gaara, face split by a wide, toothy grin, tugs Lee’s face towards him by the ear.

“Welcome to the pack,” he whispers.

**Author's Note:**

> Be sure to check out the other GaaLee Bingo fills on Tumblr [@gaalee-bingo!](https://gaalee-bingo.tumblr.com)


End file.
